Rethinking the Region: New Approaches to 9-12 U.S. Curriculum onthe Middle East & North Africa
Excerpt: A curriculum resource developed for the British Council and Social Science Research Council’s Our Shared Past Program
Recurring narratives in K-12 World History curricula in the United States, mostly told through textbooks, often occlude as much as they reveal. Broad categories used to frame
‘World History’ (civilizations, nations, religions, and regions) assume monolithic identities rather than heterogeneous, multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies. While the categories enumerated above may serve as organizing tools to describe peoples, places, and phenomena, they also generate and reify fixed notions of identity that may inappropriately ‘Other’ related communities, masking the ways in which broader societies and wide regions have historically shared practices, cultural concepts, and societal norms. For example, oversimplification of categories often results in the conflation of the history of the Middle East with the history of Islam. Curricula more responsive to that region’s diversity of traditions would correct the assumption that Islamic and Middle Eastern history are synonymous (as numerous traditions, from Manichaeism to Zoroastrianism to Christianity and Judaism have a longer history in the Middle East than does Islam, which itself has a varied and multifaceted past, within and beyond Arabia and the Middle East).
Read more: http://teach-mena.org/curriculum.pdf
Recommended Citation
Hantzopoulos, M. & M. Bajaj, A. Ghaffar-Kucher, R. Shirazi, & Z. Zakharia. (2013). Rethinking the Region: New Approaches to 9-12 U.S. Curriculum on the Middle East and North Africa. New York, NY: SSRC/British Council Our Shared Past.